A wide variety of materials are used to provide coverings for windows. The purpose of these coverings is to control the amount of light entering the window and also to provide greater privacy for someone inside a room equipped with window coverings. These can include movable drapes, retractable shades, and various types of blinds. Blind coverings ordinarily consist of slats. These slats are a variety of widths from several inches to less than an inch. The slats may be vertically mounted or they may be horizontally mounted. The vertical blinds generally open by sliding back into compact bundles at the vertical sides of a window so equipped. The horizontal blinds usually hang from cords and may be raised or lowered by pulling the cords. In the fully raised position the slats are in a tight bundle at the top of the window. When the catch on the cord is released, gravity pulls the blinds downward. The metal slats comprising the blinds hang in a spaced relationship with each other. In addition to the capacity to manipulate the blinds to open and close, these blinds are also equipped with a rotary drive so that orientation of the metal slats relative to the window can change to cover the window or to uncover the window. For a vertical blind, the uncovered position is when the slats are oriented perpendicular to the window on which they are mounted. The same is true for the horizontal blinds. In a covered position, the blinds are rotated through the rotatable drive mechanism so that the slats are approximately parallel to the surface of the window. If in the covered position, the blinds form an opaque covering unless the materials of which the blinds are made are translucent. Closing the blind and rotating them into the covered position effectively shuts out most of the light from the outside and provides greater privacy for the room where the window is located.
Ordinarily, the control which adjusts the orientation of the slat material of the blind to the window on which they are mounted is called a “wand.” This wand is a generally cylindrical rod-like device which hangs on the control for the rotatable drive of the blind. Because the blinds are ordinarily mounted at the top of the window, the wand hangs vertically from the point of mounting of the blind on the window to a height where it can be easily reached and adjusted by a user of the blind. By rotating the wand, a rotatable drive in the blind mechanism is rotated and this adjusts the orientation of an individual slats of the blind to the window allowing for control of the amount of light and the amount of visibility into the room through the window to the outside.
Because the user would like the window to remain as unobstructed as possible, the wands themselves are ordinarily placed at one corner of the blind where they hang as unobtrusively as is consistent with their functional requirements. Wands are frequently made of a translucent plastic material, though wooden ones are also found on occasion, especially for blinds where the slat materials are made of wood. The wand is ordinarily relatively small in diameter. The most common sizes are ⅜ inch or 5/16 inch, although on occasion wands as thick as ½ inch are seen. However, the need to have the wand as visually unobtrusive as possible conflicts with the functional need of having a wand that may be easily operated. A variety of alternative means of rotating the wand have been proposed. Wands with actuators have been proposed by Jacobson, U.S. Pat. No. 5,787,953. A similar system is seen in Metcalf et al, U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,897 and in an earlier Jacobson patent, U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,132. Metcalf et al U.S. Pat. No. 6,089,303 poses a control system for a wand including slidably longitudinal component parts which allows the wand to be rotated with a short linear stroke of one component of the wand control system.
Some of these, especially the Metcalf '303 patent recognize that manipulating a wand may be difficult for people with impairments in their hands. Manipulation of the small control rod with the fingers can be a trying experience for someone with significant arthritis in the fingers. However, despite this earlier work, there is an unmet need for an accessory for wand systems which do not require replacement of the original wand on a blind. The accessory can be readily used to make manipulation and control of the wand easier for people with impairments and also provides a way of expressing decorative ideas of the owners of the wand system thereby increasing the utility of the wand system so that it not only controls the operation of the blinds, but also itself may be a decorative item.